Boardinghouse

source: Boardinghouse

This is a consistently boring, gonzo-style, shot-on-videotape slasher movie and it is amateur in every way. That is, until the final 10-min, where it becomes decent. However, by that point, you will have surely abandoned all hope. This movie is TERRIBLE, people, and not worth anyone's time. Although fairly heavy on the T&A (the women are mixed), most of the scenes are unacceptably dull and the male lead is incredibly annoying. (Picture a 115-lb David Lee Roth wannabe, who insists on showing off his embarrassingly tiny arms sleeveless for most of the movie. (That is, when he isn't wearing only bikini briefs). I spent an hour debating how much I'd pay to see him get clotheslined). Anyhow, as a slasher movie, "Boardinghouse" is 90% unconvincing, but also thoroughly unfunny. Expect about seven fairly tame murders (e.g. electrocuted in the bathtub, drowned in the pool, stabbed in the dark, etc.), with the majority of the first 90-min spent on filler dialog sequences between the girls and a range of coked-up wimps. In the accompanying interview featurette, the filmmakers claim that the project was originally made as a horror comedy, but the distributor reedited it into a slasher film. Although I don't buy it, this might explain some of the poopiness, but it doesn't explain most of it. Even for gonzo, this one is difficult, and it rubbed us the wrong way. I think the main deal was seeing the cast having so much fun, while we, the frustrated audience, ground our teeth into powder. In a word: excruciating. O.5 star. ---|--- Reviews by Flak Magnet

A fancy abode that was closed down in the wake of a series of murders gets reopened as a boardinghouse by clairvoyant Jim Royce (the supremely sleazy John Wintergate). Pretty soon the killings begin anew. Man, does this hilariously horrendous honey possess all the right wrong stuff to qualify as a real four-star stinkeroonie: Hopelessly all-thumbs (mis)direction by Wintergate (who also wrote the talky drawn out script), lousy acting from a lame no-name cast, tacky gore, a plodding pace, shoddy (far from) special effects, a redundant hum'n'shiver synthesizer score that sounds like it was culled from third-rate John Carpenter outtakes, a meandering narrative, fuzzy'n'ugly shot-on-cheap-video cinematography, cheesy computer graphics, clumsily staged murder set pieces, and such stock characters as a creepy 'Nam vet gardener and a painfully unfunny comic relief drunk. On the tasty trashy plus side, several foxy babes bare their hot bodies with pleasing regularity. An absolute schlocky hoot and a half.

Oh this movie was really bad, it's one of those movies that you can't judge a movie by it's cover movie. This movie was about a playboy, Don Johnson with a bad hairdo gigolo that inherits a house haunted by the previous owners who apparently died during a party ten years ago. After the man gets settled in, he totally surrounds himself with women that look to be rejects from a cheap porno movie that couldn't get any decent roles much less acting abilty and decided to settle with this one instead. Jim, the owner of the house is into some metaphysics and involves one of the tenants with it also who is having nightmares that become obnoxious throughout the movie with her midnight screaming and unexplained flashbacks of the meaning of these dreams. In the beginning of the movie we are subjected with typing words that gave me more of a headache than this horrible movie did. During the movie we see a drunk veteran that the movie seems to place as the killer in the movie who is all but laughable in his biker suit, wig and glasses. After watching this movie, I wanted to do exactly what the victims did to themselves in this movie and that was to rip my guts out, dive in a pool and drown and I'm sure you'll feel the same way. Avoid it!

'Boarding House' is one audaciously top-ten, top-popping, scream teen tormentor! A low-rent B-movie monstrosity of titillatingly Tromatized, skid row-skeezey, cheap-as-chips, twice-as-greazy, groovily girl-goring, death-dreaming delirium! Watch in bicuspid-bashing terror as some erotically challenged, sick-headed, fat-backed, funk-baller, righteously slays a bodacious bevy of sickly sweet-lookin', big haired, pneumatically jugged, goofy-headed, aerobically-assed. Uber-babes! 'Boarding House' can ONLY admit those hardier sick-headed souls able to cope with such inhumane resolve-dissolving excesses of conniption-inducing, scalp-singing, gut-churning, generously cheese-laden 80s horror!!!! This is one hotly-buttered, thickly slice n' diced, hellaciously hardcore murder-mess of serially slashing, arterially spraying, blissfully bloody, bodaciously babe-slaying B-Movie madness! - 'Who might actually dare to spend one frightful night at the 'Boarding House?...where the rent won't KILL YOU, but something else WILL!!!'

Holy Crapola-fest Batman! Dear God I haven't seen something so utterly bad, so awful, so mindnumbingly ATROCIOUS in all my years! This is pitiful. Just plain pitiful. I've seen dozens and dozens of schlocky, snooze-inducing, inconceivable messes of film but man does BOARDINGHOUSE take the friggin' cake! NEVER have I seen a film where it ACTUALLY hurt me to sit there and watch it! Ok, now that I'm done with my unnecessary banter...let me explain to you the award winning "plot" (LOL!). A man (who is really awkward looking) rents a house for sale and places an ad in the paper for "women 18-25 not attached and beautiful". Naturally, a bunch of fun lovin' 20 somethings show up. Throughout the movie they whine, moan, and complain...occasionally showing up in various states of undress (isn't that a MUST in 80s exploitation??). All fun aside (yeah, right) a poltergeist moves into the house to brutally butcher, chop, mutilate, and murder our adorable girls. These murder sequences are indeed quite gory, but I'll be damned if they were done by anyone who is, at the very least, a competent (and that's saying a lot) fx artist. Take one scene in the beginning of the movie for instance: This poltergeist creature (or whatever you wanna call it) uses some kind of mind control to force a guy to literally disembowel himself. It is night at first, but when the camera goes in for the close-up to show the guy graphically pulling out his intestines it is in broad DAYLIGHT! It's SO noticeable. I won't even mention the fact that the "guts" are simply just sitting at the bottom of his tucked-in shirt for him to grab out...the fx get worse. I can't remember how the movie ends since it's been awhile (or maybe I suffered brain damage), but much of the film we're lead to believe the main protagonist is the one responsible for the ghastly murders. Did I mention how awkward looking he is? Oh yeah, guess I did haha. Up and coming fx artists might want to take notice on how to do really cheap, amateurish make-up and blood. That's the ONLY good I might see coming from this film. Had it not been SOV, the script revised a bit (ok, a lot), cut out the boring/annoying stuff...it would've STILL only been just tolerable! At best! Oh yeah, I failed to mention this is all filmed in "Horror-Vision". Gory images follow an annoying UFO-like sound, or a poorly done, computer effect full of bright colors with a black-gloved hand on the screen (??) to warn viewers with a weaker stomach. Cool concept...none of which is done right. Don't let gutter trash like this take up 80 some mins. of your life. I regret it.

A voice-over explains the HorrorVision concept, scary scenes being preceded either by some weird video effect blooming around a black glove, or a certain musical cue. I didn't really get it... Some opening exposition appears on a computer screen, but the quality of the video was not very good and I could make very little of it out. At least some of what the computer screen shows is actually depicted, I guess, some Nobel Prize winning scientist falling into his pool and drowning, and a woman bleeding copiously after her hand gets stuck in a below-sink garbage disposal. There's some scene in a hospital of a nurse who was going to recommend against someone being released committing suicide by hanging, and a orderly or doctor who disembowels himself with his hands as someone breathing in through their nose, and out through their mouth "sniff... ha HAAA! sniff... ha HAAA!" apparently forces them to do it. A guy tries to get some hot roommates by advertising the rooms at $100 apiece, which for Los Angeles is quite a deal, I guess, even in 1982. Supposedly the house has ten bedrooms, but it seems like he gets only about five women, and when another arrives all the rooms are taken and she has to get the child's room being used as a storage closet. There's also an Asian woman who appears in some scenes, but not others. The landlord, Jim, has some kind of business deal with a drunk involving computer printouts. He uses the strange breathing technique the killers uses to move things with his mind. One of the women in the house becomes interested in his mind control and pyramid grid and crystals, etc. and checks out Wisdom of the Mystic Masters, two volumes of A Course in Miracles, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, among others. A plan is made to have Victoria's band set up on Friday at the house for a party on Saturday, I think. At some point Jim goes to the beach with Cindy and he's struck over the head, and she starts bleeding and walks into the ocean. When he comes to, he doesn't think to report this. There's at least a few scenes where their continuity is difficult to determine immediately. One involves a guy named Richard hiring a PI to find somebody. Another involves two policemen briefly coming to the house, one dressed in a shiny green suit and vest. Somebody also has a nightmare while they're sleeping in the den while their room is painted. There's a weird gardener who saved Jim's late uncle in Vietnam hobbling about. There's odd poltergeist activity in the bathrooms (one which needs its grout cleaned even before the blood gets on it). A bloody icepick gets buried in the yard by one of the women after it stabs another through the hand, while another woman suspiciously gardens compulsively. What to say about it? It's by no means the worst shot-on-video horror flick - The Last Slumber Party is worse, for one. It's also superior to a lot of more recent shot-on-digital video horror. Johnn Wintergate and Kalassu have been up to more new age stuff since this movie, and if there really will be a DVD with a commentary track by them, I'd definitely check it out.

Phew, I'm really glad that's over! Many movies are plain bad, but "Boardinghouse" goes several stages beyond bad; - straight to the point of being downright unwatchable. After three failed attempts already, I now literally forced myself to finish it, and only good old-fashioned stubbornness (I did pay 12 Euros for the French DVD edition after all) motivated me to persist until the end. You could ask yourself several valid questions whilst analyzing "Boardinghouse". What was John Wintergate thinking when he penned down the script and reckoned it would make a proper film? Better yet, what were the producers and distributors thinking when they decided to theatrically release this piece of SOV rubbish? But let's get back to John Wintergate, as he is the undoubtedly proud writer, director, make-up artist and lead hero of his self-declared masterpiece. Wintergate certainly doesn't have any modesty issues, as he introduces his character Jim Royce as a telekinetically gifted yoga-instructor and natural born ladies' magnet. When Jim inherits and reopens a former boardinghouse, beautiful and lewd girls are literally standing in line to become his tenants! These girls don't mind sharing Jim's hunky muscular body, spend their days splashing in the pool like 8-year-olds and gaze with sheer admiration when Jim randomly levitates eggs. In fact, the only remotely meaningful line of dialogue in the entire film comes from a supportive male character when he enters the house, looks around and asks: "What is this, a harem?". Unfortunately for Jim and his babes, evil forces are also roaming within the walls of this boardinghouse. These evil forces caused several unresolved massacres in the past and not even our psychic wonder boy with his terrifying yoga-pants can prevent another bloodbath from happening! Apart from the utterly senseless script and the painfully amateurish acting performances, "Boardinghouse" is also inept in every single technical department. The SOV camerawork is obviously shoddy, the sound & editing are miserable, and even for this level of low-budget cinema, the splatter effects are abominable. Wintergate evidently also couldn't resist inserting a couple of pathetic and typically 80s gimmicks, like the "Horror Vision". This concerns showing a bizarre image and playing a nearly inaudible sound prior to "shocking and/or petrifying scenes", supposedly to warn squeamish spectators and give them an opportunity to look away. Yeah, whatever, stuff like that only worked when William Castle invented it in the late fifties/early sixties already. The only scary thing about this production is that there apparently exists a 157 minutes director's cut! Sitting through that version would be my personal definition of pure hell. "Boardinghouse" incomprehensible has a fair share of loyal fans, and there will always be people who recommend die-hard horror genre fanatics to check it out. Well, I'm also a die-hard horror fanatic, but I can safely confirm that "Boardinghouse" is NOT worth your time or money.

About 15 years ago I bought a beta VCR at a flea market for $10 bucks. I could only find one beta video in the whole place, and it was Boarding House. I was forced to watch it repeatedly (being that I had no other tapes) and, thus, I developed quite an affection for it. This year I was lucky to see it on the big screen as part of a exploitation film festival in San Francisco. The audience absolutely loved the tale of a haunted suburban house in LA exclusively populated by about a dozen bikini-clad women who spend most of the time lounging around the pool and painting each other's nails. It's laughably bad (about as bad as a * film) and acted out by the cutest bunch of typical LA resident wanna be starlets you've ever seen. The plot-advancing dialogue is mostly claptrap, but the interactions between the girls is somewhat convincing (mostly ad-libbed) and resembles a really bad advertisement for a phone party line you might see on USA Up All Night. It seems everyone involved took this film very seriously (according to the credits, some of the actresses doubled as "production managers") and the result is almost charming, like a really bad cheerleading routine that's impossible to cut up because the girls are so adorable.

Boarding House made in the 80's was one of the first shot on video features. What is interesting is that it actually played in a few theatres and of I was one of the 6 people who saw it at a Long Island NY drive-in. Who cares about how poor the acting and story is, there is plenty of gruesome gore and nudity in this one. This movie will numb your mind quite well and you will just want to keep watching it over and over again!! I own BOARDING HOUSE and I'm proud of it!!! BOARDINGHOUSE is good for all the wrong reasons. Good Gore, poor acting, sound, and everything else. I like Cheese I'm Sorry but I'm addicted to bad movies .